The Arrow

The Arrow (1997)

The right stuff. The wrong time.

The story of the Avro Arrow, the world's fastest fighter plane built in 1950's Canada, and how the project was dropped due to political pressure from the United States.

Date of release
1997-01-12
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (13)
Runtime
3h 0m
Genres
Drama, TV Movie
Director
Don McBrearty

Casting

Interesting facts

The Arrow is a four-hour television miniseries produced for CBC Television in 1997, starring Dan Aykroyd as Crawford Gordon, experienced wartime production leader after World War II and president of Avro Canada during its attempt to produce the Avro Arrow supersonic jet interceptor aircraft. The film also stars Michael Ironside and Sara Botsford. The mini-series is noted as having the highest viewership ever for a CBC program.

Production

Although the miniseries is based on history, it is a work of fiction, employing composite characters and depicting some events that actually did not take place. It acknowledges that there is no hard evidence to support the fictional final scenes, depicting one Arrow that escaped the torches used to tear the other Arrows apart, in accord with allegations attributed to reporter June Callwood.

Wetaskiwin resident Allan Jackson's efforts to build a full-scale model of the Arrow were discovered during the research phase of pre-production. An offer was made to complete the model and use it in the miniseries. A CBC crew of model makers and set designers completed the full-scale model in time for principal photography that took place in Winnipeg.

The full-scale Arrow model differs slightly from those built in 1957-59. It was featured throughout the film but the wing structure had a pronounced outer panel dihedral that was "corrected" by CGI work. The wing design was seen on-screen "only" on a wind tunnel model crafted after an "all-nighter" by Chamberlin that was stable at Mach 2.5 and higher.

At the end of film production, Jackson's model was returned but had to be cut into sections in order to fit on the flat-bed trucks used to transport the model to Alberta. After arriving at the Reynolds Alberta Museum in Wetaskawin, Jackson and a team of volunteers reconstructed the model for display at the Abbotsford Air Show in 1997.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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